Superfund institutional controls always fail

Letter to the Editor:

I am most happy to see Lincoln County and DEQ dredge up and attempt to put in place some of the political rhetoric surrounding the initial re-discovery of the amphibole asbestos contamination in Libby and its associated human epidemic of disease and death. As you are aware some of that rhetoric was completely thrown out when it became inconvenient for EPA. Specifically the parts from both Christy Todd Whitman and Governor Judy Martz ensuring that there would be a complete clean-up of Libby, thereby avoiding entirely any future need for institutional controls in Libby’s future. It was never to be because of EPA’s poor planning and inability to realize what it was they had stepped into right from the very beginning. 

I bring this up because the failures associated with institutional controls in other cities in the United States are directly related to poor or the absence of good planning at the start. Or even more commonly the future changing of plans, as EPA did in Libby, by people with no conception at all of what they are doing, resulting in increased widespread disease. Anyone involved who may wish to visit said failures, prior to creating institutional controls for Libby by sheer imagination alone, should do so and should get a solid understanding of what these failures mean for the people who have been left behind. Those places are Ambler, Penn., El Dorado County, Calif., (all amphibole areas of California with the exception of The San Francisco Water District management of the New Calaveras Dam project) and Jefferson Parrish, La., for starters. 

I should indicate that there has been one success in the U.S. Well, depending upon how one looks at it. That is in Globe, Ariz. It wasn’t a success with institutional controls though. Those seem doomed to fail no matter what. In Globe the people who were exposed, showing no signs of disease or any discomfort at all, were picked up and moved away from their exposures. Which once all aspects of environmental exposure anywhere is analyzed, is the only realistic course of action. They were removed from exposure levels to Chrysotile asbestos, that had they stayed would have killed one person in every one million mesotheliomas. Amounting to one person every 400 years or so in Globe. Libby of course is one person or more each year, with no good handle on the numerical count of others who become irreversibly ill. EPA had the right idea in Globe, just the wrong fiber type and the wrong town. It is worth mentioning that this removal occurred at a time that it was fully obvious that Libby was suffering the kinds of deaths that have become familiar.

Where the problems of institutional controls seem to occur is with the subjective view of “expense”. No amount of asbestos is going to interfere eventually with some politicians or connected corporate head’s idea of setting up some monument to his or her self. In Ambler, the state of Pennsylvania wants to build housing directly on top of an asbestos dump. No institutional controls are going to stop them. They weren’t stopped in California either when the very same thing happened. Additional problems occur from natural soils processes and the ever present vast underestimate of risk associated with amphibole asbestos by amateurs given authority. Libby has amphibole. Meaning they should never allow any exposures. It is not the same thing as Helena or Eureka or San Francisco or even Tokyo exposures. It is dead serious and a world class problem deserving of world class advice. 

Terry Trent,

Auburn, Calif.